Dual approach promising in advanced melanoma
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A new analysis of a group of patients with advanced metastatic melanoma treated with peptide vaccines after surgery shows an average survival of nearly 4 years—far longer than seen in previous trials.
“Patients with resected Stage IV melanoma can do a lot better than we thought,” Dr. Jeffrey S. Weber of the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles, the study’s lead author, told Reuters Health. “We would want to do at least that well, if not better, in any future trials.”
Weber and his team analyzed survival for 41 patients with Stage IV melanoma because “a fair number of the patients had done very well,” he explained. The patients, who had participated in a total of five clinical trials, had all undergone resection of distant sites of disease followed by peptide vaccines therapy.
In the current analysis, median follow-up was 5.6 years. Overall median survival after enrollment in the clinical trial was 3.8 years, while five-year survival was 45 percent. At the last follow-up, five patients remained free of disease without requiring further therapy.
Median survival for patients with metastatic melanoma has been reported to be 7 to 9 months, Weber and colleagues point out in the journal Cancer, while recent reports of median survival for these patients after complete surgical resection of metastatic cancer range from 13 to18 months.
While the current findings cannot confirm that the extended survival seen in the patients was due to vaccine therapy, they do show that prolonged survival can occur in patients with stage IV melanoma treated with surgery and peptide vaccines, the team notes.
SOURCE: Cancer March 15, 2006.
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